One of the happiest periods in my life began about six months after my fifteenth birthday. I finally got to know what real love felt like. Not with another lover, but with someone who was probably as starved for affection as I was: an old woman who had already buried three husbands and had one foot in the grave herself.
Odessa Wheeler moved into the apartment across the hall from me and my parents. The same week she moved in, I began doing all kinds of errands for her to earn a little extra spending money. Even though I had no trouble stealing the things I wanted (including the portable color television in my bedroom), I actually felt good about myself when I paid for something with money I’d earned.
Every time I ran to the corner store to pick up this or that for Miss Odessa or when I helped her move a piece of furniture, she paid me a few dollars and often gave me a big hug, too. “Christine, I don’t know what I’d do without you. You are precious,” she told me one Saturday afternoon. I left in a hurry after she told me that because I didn’t want her to see the tears in my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time somebody said something so nice to me.
It didn’t take long for me to reach a point where I looked forward to the hugs more than I did the money. This was so new to me that I didn’t know how to handle it at first. It made me want to avoid a lot of the people who had had a negative effect on me. Sadly, this included my parents.
“Now, Christine. Today is Mother’s Day, and you should be spending it with your own mother,” Miss Odessa told me. I had just steamrolled into her living room that Sunday evening, with a Mother’s Day card for her.
“My mother doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day,” I said glumly, handing Miss Odessa the card, which I’d bought at Walgreen’s and which had set me back three dollars.
“That’s not the point. She is still your mother,” Miss Odessa told me, fanning her face with the card.
Miss Odessa was so old, her hair was completely white and lines crisscrossed her face like a road map. But I figured that she must have been a good-looking woman once upon a time to have had three husbands. She had small, dainty features on a heart-shaped face, and her skin was the same color as honey. She was not a big woman, but what was left of her body had begun to sag so severely that bras and girdles did her no good. Decked out in a pale blue cotton dress and the matching hat that she’d worn to church that morning, she stood in front of me, with one hand on her lumpy hip and the other hand waving the Mother’s Day card at me.
“This is a real special day for mothers and their children, Christine. Even to the mothers that don’t deserve to be mothers,” she added, giving me a stern look. It didn’t bother me when I got scolded by Miss Odessa. As a matter of fact, I was glad when she did.
I gave her a sheepish grin, shuffled my feet like an idiot, and shrugged. I don’t know why, but one thing I couldn’t do was sass old people. Even when they were mean to me. I figured it had something to do with that incident when I was a little girl and stepped on that old man’s head in our old house and thought I’d killed him. Even though I had found out that that man had died of natural causes, to this day I still felt a twinge of guilt about stepping on him and not telling anybody about it.
“Are your kids coming to spend Mother’s Day with you?” I asked.
A sad look immediately appeared on Miss Odessa’s face. It was the same look that slid across my face when people asked me something I didn’t want to answer. But she answered me, anyway. “I doubt it,” she replied in a hollow voice, shuffling across the floor to one of two shabby easy chairs in her congested living room. She had one of the smallest units in our building, but she had more possessions than anybody I’d ever seen. As petite as I was, I often had to walk sideways to get around in her apartment, and I still sometimes managed to knock over something along the way. “They hardly do anymore. Not since they all grew up and moved into their own places. I had me three husbands, a bunch of kids, and I still ended up alone,” she said, with a dry laugh.
It amazed me how much I actually had in common with this old woman. Miss Odessa was even older than my parents, and from what I’d learned from her in bits and pieces that day, all five of her kids lived in or around Berkeley, but they practically ignored her. Her youngest son had a new wife and a year-old daughter, whom Miss Odessa had never met, and they lived just six blocks away.
I could see the sadness in the old woman’s eyes when she talked about her children. I decided to change the subject for now and avoid it in the future. In the next breath, I started rambling about something I’d seen on television, and before long we were laughing.
As footloose and fancy-free as I was, I was fairly sensitive. It didn’t happen that often, but I got emotional from time to time. I had cried off and on for two days when, a few months before, old Mr. Royster next door died.
I spent the rest of the evening stretched out like a python on one of Miss Odessa’s two living room sofas, watching one rerun after another. She liked beer, and she usually kept a couple of six-packs in her refrigerator. She kept dozing off, so I could have drunk as many of her beers as I wanted to, but I didn’t. I didn’t need a buzz to feel good when I was with her.
It was a school night, and if Miss Odessa had not chased me home around eight o’clock, I would have stayed even longer, watching more television and poring over the magazines that she had stacked up in boxes throughout her apartment. She also had an incomplete set of encyclopedias, which I found fascinating. Through them, I entered a whole new world, and I started to see a lot of things in my old world in a better light, including myself.